Emotional
awareness can be elusive for many reasons. Although we swim in a “sea
of emotions”14
and are in a state of “perpetual emotion”15
many of us are not aware of what we are feeling,
especially when we are intellectually engaged. It is usually only
when we are experiencing a strong emotion or feeling that we become
aware of it—particularly when it is a negative one.

There
is, however, no evidence that we are conscious of all
of our feelings, and much to suggest that we are not. For example, we
often realize quite suddenly, in a given situation, that we feel
anxious or comfortable, pleased or relaxed, and it is apparent that
the particular state of feeling we know then has not begun on the
moment of knowing but rather sometime before.16

We
have another significant challenge to becoming emotionally aware: we
may find it hard to identify particular emotions we are feeling. Part
of the difficulty with identifying emotions is that they can
masquerade as other feelings. For example, anger can mask fear,
shame, hurt, or self-doubt. If we want to become emotionally aware,
we must become adept at unbundling and identifying feelings so that
they can be acknowledged and dealt with. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton,
and Sheila Heen17
suggest that “simply becoming familiar with the spectrum of
difficult-to-find emotions may trigger a flash of recognition.”
Thus, understanding the spectrum of emotions and becoming fluent with
the language of emotion can greatly assist in building emotional
awareness.

The Language of
Emotion

Although
most of us struggle to put emotions into words, there are literally
thousands of words in the English lexicon to describe different
emotions18
and hundreds of definitions of emotion.19
Here are a few:

[A]n
emotion is a felt experience … When someone says or does
something that is personally significant to you, your emotions
respond, usually along with associated thoughts, physiological
changes, and a desire to do
something.20

[M]ost
agree in defining emotions as brief, rapid responses involving
physiological, experiential, and behavioral activity that help humans
respond to survival-related problems and opportunities. Emotions are
briefer and have more specific causes than moods.21

I
take emotion to refer to a feeling and its distinctive thoughts,
psychological and biological states, and range of propensities to
act. There are hundreds of emotions along with their blends,
variations, mutations and nuances. Indeed, there are many more
subtleties of emotion than we have words for.22

Most
definitions of emotion
refer to several components: the feeling of the emotion, thoughts
arising out of or in association with the feeling, the physiological
changes (for example, changes in heart rate and blood pressure), and
the urge to act. These components are important because they allow us
to better understand emotions and also create different tools for
dealing with them. For example, understanding the thoughts associated
with particular emotions allows us to cool those emotions down by
applying different labels to them, changing the nature of our
thoughts about them, or stopping those thoughts altogether. An
understanding
of the physiological changes related to emotions allows us to
recognize emotions
earlier through bodily awareness. There is also a behavioral
component to emotion—a propensity to act or a desire to do
something. Certain emotions, through physiological changes, prime us
to react physically, which can have disadvantages at the negotiation
table. When someone is angry, for example, blood rushes to the
extremities so that there is less blood to service the higher centers
of brain function. This physical reaction provides a very cogent
reason for learning to recognize and deal with anger before it can
affect our behavior and cloud our thinking.

The
primary emotions, of which all other emotions are blends, are
sadness,
anger,
fear,
enjoyment,
love,
surprise,
disgust,
and shame.23
However, even these primary emotions may be
difficult to identify.24
Figure 9.1 describes a few emotions that are hard to recognize and
the feelings with which they are associated. Although figure 9.1
presents only a very short list of emotions, a recent survey of
emotional descriptors from thesauri produced a list thousands of
words long that, when narrowed down to “discrete emotional
concepts,” resulted in 412 discrete emotions.25
These findings underline how extensive and rich the human emotional
experience truly is. Figure 9.2 lists a number of positive and
negative emotions that negotiators should be aware of, not only in
themselves, but also in the other side.

Figure
9.3 presents another categorization of emotions that is helpful in
dealing with strong negative emotions: hot and cool feelings.26
By being able to identify and label hot and cool feelings, we can
start to use techniques to move away from hot feelings, which can
derail a negotiation, toward cool feelings.